The World Goes Dark So We Can See the Light

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2019 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

One of the confusing things about the season of Advent is that it is a curious blend of darkness and light. Darkness that speaks of the end of one world and light that speaks of birth of another. In today’s readings we are called to, “Cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” We hear those glorious, prophetic words from Isaiah about how when the Lord’s house is established on the highest mountain, when God is all in all and human being are fashioned into perfect expressions of the Spirit of love and peace, swords will be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Instruments of war and violence will be transfigured into tools of abundance and plenty. Advent is an in-between time, a time when something needs to tumble down in order to make a little room for something new to emerge. The world needs to go dark in order that we might be reminded of where to look for the light, and in whom the light that makes us a little more like itself is to be found.

I remember when our youngest daughter got a new pair of sneakers—the light-up kind that sparkle with all sorts of different colors when you take the littlest step. Eager to show them off to me, she said, “Hey Dad, Look at my new shoes! See the lights?” The only problem was that it was three in the afternoon and I couldn’t see anything. “Follow me,” I said, as we went into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned off the light. We were gathered there in watchful anticipation, breath held like a cap in the hand.  “Ok, now jump.” And sure enough, aided by the mirror over the sink, the bathroom began to dance with splashes of color bouncing off the tiles, the faucets, the shower curtain. It was a veritable disco in our tiny little bathroom. John Travolta and Karen Gorney from Saturday Night Fever would have been jealous. We had to enter the darkness in order the see the light, but boy was it worth it.

That’s one way to understand the confusion of darkness and light in the season of Advent—the usual ways we go about looking for joy, peace, and happiness in all the wrong places go dark in order that we might find our vision trained towards the true light, the light of beauty, truth, and goodness revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ. And we turn to the light not just as admirers of the light as if we are on a drive around the neighborhood after dark looking at the Christmas decorations, no, we turn to light in order that we might actually become the light we are looking at. Advent is this powerful reminder that in liturgy we are actually enacting something, we are making a journey, we are being shaped and formed into who God wants us to be—bearers of Christ’s light, and transmitters of Christ’s light to all whom we meet.

It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s certainly a fact of human nature that we become more like that which we worship. Worship power and we find ourselves looking over our shoulder for someone more powerful than we are. Worship good looks and there’s not enough Sephora to stave off those crow’s feet around the eyes, or hair tonic to cover up our graying temples. Worship money and we never have enough. Worship our intellect and we’ll live in fear of someone who’s inevitably smarter or rue the day when we’re not as mentally nimble as we used to be.

So Advent is a time where those usual ways of securing our identity, those usual ways of pursuing happiness are moved into the background, they go dark, so that the peace that passes understanding, the joy for which we are made, the rest for which our restless hearts long, might come to the fore. Remember those words of St. Augustine from chapter 10 of The Confessions, that serve as a kind of mission statement for the season of Advent:

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

You know the story. St. Augustine sought everywhere something to give rest to restless heart. He sought in pleasures of the flesh. He sought it in oratorical prowess. He sought it in mastering the philosophy of the Manicheans. And despite getting what he thought he wanted, he still felt that ache in his soul. It was only when he turned to God, when he stopped looking for fulfillment in the pursuit of outward pleasures that he found the God-shaped piece for the God-shaped hole in his heart.

And that’s the rather astounding thing about the Christian way. We already are that which we seek. The hidden treasure, that which we’re looking for, has already been buried in the field of the heart. The pearl of great price has already been gifted to us, free, unearned, unmerited, as the love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Advent is that time when the old ways of looking outside of ourselves go dark, so that we might be reminded of the proper place to look for the peace, fulfillment, and joy for which we are made. Our first instinct is always to look “out there” in more things, better relationships, new jobs, leaner and meaner bodies, you name it. But Advent is this time when we are reminded that we are already in possession, or perhaps better possessed by, that which we are so ardently seeking. The only question is whether we can make a little space for those old ways of looking outside to gently fall apart, that we might discover the treasure that been here all along.

That’s why we have some many references to being awake and being alert during Advent. It’s so easy as our schedules crowd up with parties, and the number of shopping days before Christmas rapidly diminishes, to get swept along by the sheer speed of the season. We live in a culture of distraction whose primary function is to make us into ever more efficient consumers of things we don’t need and won’t ultimately fulfill us. And so, the call to wait, to call to watch, the call to attend to the Always Attentive One who dwells in the creche of our hearts, is a powerful intervention and example of counter-imagination in a culture of getting and spending.

Sometimes you’ll hear Advent described as a kind of mini-Lent. And if that’s so, what is it, we might ask, that we are fasting from? You might say we are fasting from the illusion that God is separate from us, that God is absent. We are fasting from seeking the love for which we are made “out there,” and practice turning instead to the gift that has always-already been right here. That means we need to make some space in this season for God to get at us. We need to make some time to simply be, to rest in God, that the staggering riches of God’s gift of God’s very self to us might start to dawn on us like the morning star rising in the heart as Peter puts it. What if Advent were a time when we set aside some time, each day, to waste time gracefully with God? Not saying prayers, not speaking much, but loving much, turning our attention for a time to the presence that is always present. What if we imagined our hearts as a house who doors and windows were flung open, waiting for the thief in the night to rob us blind, to snatch away everything that we might find that the good and broad land, the land of milk and honey, is what’s been here all along? As John Donne prayed in on of his Holy Sonnets that he was never chaste except Christ ravished him, so we might pray to be burgled of all that is not Love in us that we might know the true richness of life in Christ.

Love, gentlest, infinite, Love lies swaddled in the creche of the heart. Let’s use these days of preparation to unwrap it, that that tiny baby who is the pivot point of human history might come to live his life in and through us, that that light, His light, might shine from us like light-up sneakers on a six year-old dancing for joy in the bathroom with the lights off.